How long would he ask questions to which she could find true answers? What question would come next? There were so many he might ask and few to which she could reply so truthfully even in that narrow sense of truth which found its only meaning in a whim of chance. But for a moment he asked nothing more.
“Not mine,” she said. “It is yours. You cannot take me and yet call anything mine.”
“Ours, then, beloved. What does it matter? So he died long ago—poor man! And yet, it seems but a little while since some one told me—but that was a mistake, of course. He did not know. How many years may it be, dear one? I see you still wear mourning for him.”
“No—that was but a fancy—to-day. He died—he died more than two years ago.”
She bent her head. It was but a poor attempt at truth, a miserable lying truth to deceive herself with, but it seemed better than to lie the whole truth outright, and say that her father—Beatrice’s father—had been dead but just a week. The blood burned in her face. Brave natures, good and bad alike, hate falsehood, not for its wickedness, perhaps, but for its cowardice. She could do things as bad, far worse. She could lay her hand upon the forehead of a sleeping man and inspire in him a deep, unchangeable belief in something utterly untrue; but now, as it was, she was ashamed and hid her face.
“It is strange,” he said, “how little men know of each other’s lives or deaths. They told me he was alive last year. But it has hurt you to speak of it. Forgive me, dear, it was thoughtless of me.”
He tried to lift her head, but she held it obstinately down.
“Have I pained you, Beatrice?” he asked, forgetting to call her by the other name that was so new to him.
“No—oh, no!” she exclaimed without looking up.
“What is it then?”